The study aims to genotype 10,000 volunteers from the United States diagnosed with Crohn’s disease or ulcerative colitis, two types of inflammatory bowel disease. While the participants cannot be 23andMe customers, they will submit samples through 23andMe’s at-home saliva collection kit and fill out online surveys through 23andMe’s website.

Approximately 1.4 million people in the U.S. are diagnosed with inflammatory bowel disease, and it is more common in developed countries, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The exact cause is unknown and there is no cure.

The end goal is to develop new or improved treatments, the companies said. Pfizer already has in the pipeline two monoclonal antibodies for inflammatory bowel disease, and is also working on other treatments for chronic inflammatory diseases.

“Pfizer is committed to bringing forward new treatments for patients suffering with (inflammatory bowel disease),” said Jose Carlos Gutierrez-Ramos, senior vice president and head of biotherapeutics, research and development at Pfizer, in a statement. “By enhancing our understanding of the underlying biology of the disease, we hope to better support our clinical research activities and development programs.”

23andMe CEO Anne Wojcicki said in a statement, “We are excited to team up with Pfizer to take an innovative, consumer-centered approach to try to understand the fundamentals of inflammatory bowel disease and the variability of treatment response.”

This isn’t the first research partnership 23andMe has undertaken with outside organizations. It has teamed up with the Parkinson’s Institute to research Parkinson’s disease, for example, and with mondoBIOTECH AG in Switzerland to research rare and potentially fatal diseases. At the same time, the company is expanding its internal research capabilities: earlier this year, it received $1.4 million from the National Institutes of Health to do so.

Under an order from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, 23andMe currently cannot tell customers about their genetic health risks, but the company is working to reverse that. In the meantime, it can provide ancestry information and raw genetic data.